My grandmother, Holocaust survivor Olga Horak OAM, passed away in August 2024 just days after her 98th birthday. Just one week before, she attended her great-granddaughter’s Jewish day school to share her remarkable story of survival with the Year 6 students. Her parting message was simple: “Never forget. Don’t hate”. Although she could no longer stand up straight, in her decades-long commitment to Holocaust education as a volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum, she was indefatigable until the end.
When she died, we lost an empire of knowledge. Just as we do whenever we lose a survivor. Her strength of character, her disarming candour, her twinkly eyes, her testimony and her light have secreted themselves in the hearts of the thousands of people she touched, like little mirrors reflecting flashes of her life. A giant photo mosaic.
To carry on her legacy is a heavy burden and one fraught with vicarious trauma. Postmemory ripples and reverberates. As grandchildren, we cherished weekends with our grandparents, but come mealtime, Auschwitz cast its long shadow. I sat quietly with wide eyes, listening to stories of hiding places, denouncements and dangerous border-crossings. I learned all too young of Nazi sadism and the deprivations of camp.
Author and second-generation descendant Eva Hoffman describes it aptly in her book After Such Knowledge: “I had grown up with the subliminal expectation of catastrophe, and the received ‘memory’ of mass death in my very bones.”
Bones meant something else. If I left one on my plate at dinner, mostly eaten, my grandmother would pick it up. “Do you know what I would have done for this in Auschwitz?” she would say, waving the bone at me, the joint taking on the shape of a familiar accusation.
Growing up with this inheritance, I internalised a paradox: on the one hand, I learned that the world is suspect. Henceforth I suppressed my Jewish identity. On the other, I grew complacent about the threat of antisemitism. I rolled my eyes at her dire pronouncements. I situated the Holocaust firmly in the past, where it belonged. I naively assumed that Auschwitz had somehow inured history to the possibility of repetition.
In no small part because of what my maternal grandparents endured, I have dedicated my professional life to helping the disadvantaged. As a human rights lawyer, I have fought for nearly two decades against discrimination in all its forms. I have seen the harmful impacts of racism and persecution on many different minoritised communities.
Yet witnessing the explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in Australia since 7 October 2023 is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. Every day, the newspaper is “but a tissue of horrors” as Baudelaire once wrote – albeit now a widget which scrolls up or down at the flick of a finger. Horror begone. Though the after-image remains.
Statistics tell only half the story. In December 2024, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported a “massive increase” in the number of antisemitic incidents in Australia. Even then, the Australian Human Rights Commission says data on racism is limited. Meanwhile, In the untrammelled expanses of the internet, American non-profit Cyberwell found a 36% increase in online antisemitism between 2023 and 2024.
Despite being 98, my grandmother was not spared this modern form of hatred. When she moved into aged care in late 2023 after a bad fall and had to sell her home, there was an article which mentioned that she was a survivor. In the comments underneath were several anti-Jewish attacks. One joked about her having a “cool tattoo”. Another fantasised about burning her house down.
This is the other half of the story. A phenomenon beyond statistics. How many Jewish Australians have felt that “received memory” in our bones? How many of us have experienced, over the last 15 months, the crumbling of our shared humanity, the “dizzying upending of basic assumptions” as Hoffman put it. That people are decent. That the past is the past. That we are safe to proudly express our Judaism without fear of reprisal.
“Keep your wits about you. Make sure no one follows you to your car,” my wife said to me as I left the house to give a speech at the commemorative function at the Great Synagogue in Sydney this week. Sadly, this is where we are. The history of violence against Jewish communities is somewhere embedded in the ancestral filaments of our being. Seeing swastikas and synagogues burning in 2024 summons collective traumas to the surface, prickling the hairs on the skin like a millennium of hackles. Many of us are for the first time experiencing what it is to be hated in the abstract, as a member of a group – completely detached from any personal beliefs we may hold.
I don’t profess to have easy answers to this age-old antipathy. Right now, we are all being called upon to preserve our empathy, even when engaging those with whom we disagree. Respectful dialogue is as much about how we have conversations as it is what we say.
This is precisely what we have been practising through Holocaust education for decades: bringing the stories of survivors to the world and inviting others to make an empathic connection.
In the face of those who still refuse to see our humanity, I choose to imagine that we are humane enough to believe in theirs.
